


hold me tight and we'll watch the world burn

by thundersnowstorm



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blood and Violence, F/M, Revenge, and we all know that's what matters most, the ethics are debatable but the sexual tension is popping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 18:39:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18666109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thundersnowstorm/pseuds/thundersnowstorm
Summary: The Lannisters have taken everything from Robb Stark and Rhaenys Targaryen. They will have their pound of flesh, no matter what it takes.





	hold me tight and we'll watch the world burn

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](https://littorallbones.tumblr.com/post/183190939710/aint-it-warming-you-the-world-goin-up-in) post by litorallbones. Because morally ambiguous revenge aus are always my jam. Especially when it's set to Hozier.

_Ain't it warming you, the world gone up in flames?_  
_Ain't it the life you, your lighting of the blaze?_  
_Ain't it a waste they'd watch the throwing of the shade?_  
_Ain't you my baby, ain't you my babe?_

_\-- NFWMB, Hozier_

 

Blood is everywhere, thrumming in her ears, slick down the front of her shirt, encrusted beneath her nails. The Mountain is nothing more than flesh now, flesh and bone and blood in a pile at her feet.

Rhaenys lets her knife clatter to the floor. By the door, Robb is lowering his gun.

"I had him," she says, wiping the blood from her lips with a rough hand. She glares at him. "If you had just given me another minute -"

"He would have killed you, Rhae," Robb says, grim. He stows the gun in the waistband of his jeans.

"I would've been fine," she insists stubbornly. Her hands are shaking. This isn't the first kill she's seen, not the second or the twentieth. Her hands shouldn't be shaking.

"Rhae -" Robb reaches out to take her hand but she jerks away, instead choosing to kneel by the body, checking for a pulse. The flesh is still warm to the touch, but there is no heartbeat.

"Getting rid of the body is going to be a nightmare," she says. "Call Dacey and have her send her people over, she still owes you a favor."

"I thought we agreed against getting other people involved," Robb says, but he's already pulling out his phone.

"Do you want to try to carry a three hundred pound corpse to the Blackwater?" she asks, though it's mostly a rhetorical question.

Rhaenys pushes herself back up to her feet. There is a bathroom at the back of the dingy motel room, and she makes her way to it, mumbling something about wanting to wash her hands.

Inside, the LED light buzzes and flickers. Its harsh, blueish light casts her features in sharp relief, highlighting the deep hollows beneath her eyes. She prods the cut in her lip experimentally, ignoring the throb of pain. Her ribs ache from when the Mountain had thrown her against the wall, and she hopes they're just bruised. Broken ribs are a bitch to heal.

Rhaenys turns the rusted knob of the faucet and it splutters to life. She scrubs her hands roughly, working out every last bit of dried blood from her nails. She splashes some water on her face for good measure. Her shoulder slump, tension draining out.

Gregor Clegane is dead. There is a grim satisfaction, but not the elation she had expected from the death of the man who had murdered her mother and brother so brutally. Mostly she's just exhausted. They have been tracking him for the better part of six months, planning his death down to the detail, yet when the moment had come, she had not been strong enough.

Choosing knives had been foolish, she decides, letting her emotions govern her choices. There is something personal about knives, about feeling the life slip out between your fingers, but they were toothpicks next to a monster like Clegane. No, she would stick to guns next time. They were cleaner anyway.

_Next time, Mom,_ she promises.  _Next time I'll be stronger._ She squeezes her eyes shut but it isn't enough, not enough to forget the fear in her mother's eyes, staring down the gun in Clegane's hand, baby Aegon held tight in her arms. Rhaenys didn't see what happened next.  _Run sweetling, run as fast as you can._ The gunshot still echoes in her ears, and she can taste bile on her tongue. 

Then the house had gone up in flames, Aegon and Elia inside, and the police had ruled it a tragic accident. They had smiled at her, pity in their eyes, as though their pockets weren't stuffed with Lannister money. Justice, Rhaenys had quickly learned, came only to those who took it for themselves.

Rhaenys grips the edge of the sink, bites down on her lip until it is bleeding again. Tywin Lannister. That's who this is all really about. Clegane was just the gun. The man who loosed him is far from this motel, sleeping on silk sheets paid for with blood money. They just have to kill him, kill the man who destroyed her family, and then she can sleep through the night again.

"They're coming in ten minutes," Robb says, appearing in the bathroom behind her.

Rhaenys straightens. "Good." She twists the faucet to turn the water off and turns to face Robb. "Body or no, Lannister is going to know Clegane is dead."

"Good," he says, eyes flinty. "I want him to know we're coming for him. I want him to be afraid."

"He will be prepared," she warns.

"So will we," he says, and pulls her closer by the belt loops of her jeans. His thumb brushes over the cut on her lips.

"He's going to pay," she promises, gripping Robb's arms tight enough to leave a mark. "I want to make him hurt like he made us hurt, take away everything he has ever cared about, turn his empire into ruins. I want to make Tywin Lannister _burn_."

Robb captures her mouth in a bruising kiss. Blood is still flowing from her split lip, copper-sour, but she knows the taste too well now. He pushes her against the edge of the sink and she hisses in discomfort, digging her nails into the meat of his biceps. His hand tangles in her hair and he pulls away, forehead still leaning against hers.

"You almost died today," he whispers against her lips. His eyes are locked on hers, fierce and electric and blue. "Don't take risks like that."

Rhaenys shoves him up against the opposite wall. He doesn't resist. "Our entire life is a risk. People looking for safety don't try to take down the most powerful criminal in Westeros."

"He almost killed you," Robb insists. His hand slides down to cup her cheek. In this place, with blood drying on her lips, his gentleness feels incongruous. "You're not allowed to die on my watch."

There is a quip on her tongue, something about how he should have picked someone safer to love, but it dies on her lips before the painful ardency of his gaze. "You don't get to die on me either," she says, and her voice is hoarse.

Robb lets out a shuddering breath, and if they weren't already pressed skin-to-skin, she would pull them closer. "You're my weakness, Rhaenys Targaryen," he says, and he doesn't have to explain what he means.

They don't use the word love. Love is not for people as broken as they are, burning their way through empires to find some semblance of justice in this world. Everyone they have ever loved is dead and gone, and to admit love is to condemn the other person to the same fate. But weakness, that they understand. They rely on each other, and if either of them dies, the other will not last long, not with Lannisters and Boltons and Baratheons set on seeing them hang.

"We won't fail," she says, and it is a foolish promise to make but she makes it anyway. "Tywin Lannister and his empire will be ashes at our feet when we are done, I swear to you."

Robb's face is like marble, but his skin is on fire. They say that before his father was murdered, his mother and brothers butchered, his sisters stolen away, Robb had been what people affectionately termed an upstanding young man. Rhaenys has seen pictures of him in a school uniform, smiling uncomplicatedly at the person behind the camera. The kind of man who kissed his mother on her cheek before going to school, who helped old ladies cross the street, who did not know the feeling of a gun in his hand. That is not the Robb she knows. The man she knows can aim a gun better than most soldiers, can snap a man's neck without flinching, has a map of scars like constellations across his back.

Robb was good, once, even if it has been a long time. Rhaenys doesn't know if she was ever truly good. She learned the grit of blood far too young. But Robb holds her in his arms like she is something precious and sometimes it is enough to let herself forget the ghosts, if just for a moment.

"Vengeance and justice," he murmurs. His calloused palms are familiar on her skin and if she closes her eyes, she can pretend they are anywhere else but here, in a grimy motel that charges by the hour, a cooling corpse on the other side of the door. But no one ever said revenge was a clean sort of business.

"Fire and blood, baby," Rhaenys says, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

Tywin Lannister had best sleep with one eye open.


End file.
